Links of Note

 * Matthew K. Minerd, The Influence of John of St. Thomas Upon the Thought of Jacques Maritain (PDF)

* Gregory DiPippo, The Feast of St. Brice, St. Martin's Bad Disciple, at "New Liturgical Movement"

* Ryan Miller, Looking for Levels (PDF)

* Mario Hubert, The Nature of Natural Laws, on different conceptions of the laws of nature, at "Aeon"

* David Bannon, Joan of Arc's Grief, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Robert Reimer, Play as an Autotelic Activity: A Defense (PDF)

* Max Wade, The Dance of Reality: Plotinus and the Activity of the Whole, at the JHI Blog

* Ruth Boeker, Thomas Reid on Promises and Social Operations of the Human Mind

* Brendan de Kenessey, Ethics and the Limits of Armchair Sociology (PDF)

* Kevin Schmiesing, Cause for Conflict: The Catholic Church and Property Rights in American Law, at "Catholic World Report"

* Nico Fassino, The surprising history of the Children's Mass, at "The Pillar"

* Tyler Colby Re, The Art of Work in Kant's Critique of Judgment (PDF)

* Matthew Miller, Empty Words: Against Artificial Language, at "Mere Orthodoxy"

* Christopher Shannon, Etienne Gilson and post-conciliar theology, reviews Florian Michel's recent biography of Gilson, at "Catholic World Report"

Tracking, Tramping Soft and Low

 The Wolf-Tamer
by Elizabeth Stoddard 

Through the gorge of snow we go,
 Tracking, tramping soft and slow,
 With our paws and sheathed claws,
 So we swing along the snow,
 Crowding, crouching to your pipes -- 
Shining serpents! Well you know,
 When your lips shall cease to blow
 Airs that lure us through the snow,
 We shall fall upon your race
 Who do wear a different face.
 Who were spared in yonder vale?
 Not a man to tell the tale!
 Blow, blow, serpent pipes,
 Slow we follow:-- all our troop
 Every wolf of wooded France,
 Down from all the Pyrenees -- 
Shall they follow, follow you,
 In your dreadful music-trance?
 Mark it by our tramping paws,
 Hidden fangs, and sheathèd claws?
 You have seen the robber bands
 Tear men's tongues and cut their hands,
 For ransom we ask none -- begone,
 For the tramping of our paws,
 Marking all your music's laws,
 Numbs the lust of ear and eye;
 Or -- let us go beneath the snow,
 And silent die -- as wolves should die!

Burdensomeness

  In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment. Wherefore Seneca [Martin of Braga, Formula Vitae Honestae: cap. De Continentia] says (De Quat. Virt., cap. De Continentia): "Let your conduct be guided by wisdom so that no one will think you rude, or despise you as a cad." Now a man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude, as the Philosopher states (Ethic. iv, 8). 

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.168.4] 

Skian gar Echon ho Nomos

 For the law having an outline of the about-to-be goods, not the image of the deeds themselves, each cycle with the same sacrifices that they perpetually offer, it is never able to complete the worshippers. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, no one having any more awareness of failures, the worshippers having once been purified? But in these is remembrance of failures every year, the blood of bulls and goats powerless indeed to cut off failures. 

Therefore coming into the world, he says: Sacrifices and offerings you have not wished; but you have readied a body for me. Whole-burnings and those for failures you have not approved. Then I said, See! I have arrived to do your will, God; in the book's roll it is written about me. 

Previously saying, Sacrifices and offerings and whole-burnings and those for failures, which are offered according to law, you have not wished or approved, he then adds, See! I have arrived to do your will. He abolishes the first so that the second might stand. By the willing we are consecrated, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, once.

And indeed every priest stands each day serving, and often offering the same sacrifices, which can never eradicate failures. But he, however, one having sacrificed for failures unto perpetuity, sat to the right of God, beyond that waiting until his enemies should be laid down, a footstool for his feet. For by one offering he has completed the consecrated unto perpetuity.

[Hebrews 10:1-14, my very rough translation. The author of Hebrews is discussing Jeremiah 31, an immensely important passage for early Christians, and very formative for Christian self-understanding. The manuscript tradition disagrees about whether the first sentence should be 'it [i.e., the law] is never able to provide completion' or 'they [i.e., the sacrifices] are never able to provide completion'. 'Failures' is more usually translated as 'sins', but practically speaking I think this passage has something broader in view. For instance, the sin-offerings ('those for failures' in the above translation) were offered not for what we usually think of as sins but for sins of ignorance and purely unintentional violations of the law. They are the sacrifices you'd offer if you accidentally broke the law and only later realized it, for instance. Given that they are twice mentioned in this passage, which as a whole is specifically about sacrifices not being able to complete, it seems reasonable to take the term to be used broadly here, including even unintended and accidental failures. These accidental failures don't play a large role in most of theology, but a way of reading the above passage is as saying that Christ's sacrifice provides a consecration so complete that it deals with even unintentional and accidental moral failures, for all time.

Famously, the book of Hebrews identifies four impossible things: it is impossible for those who wholly fall away to be restored (6:4); it is impossible for God to lie (6:18); it is impossible for blood sacrifices to remove failings (10:4, above); it is impossible to please God without faith (11:6). These can be seen, I think, as the essential conditions for the new covenant that constitutes Christian life.]

A Poem Draft

 Leaves Falling

A man may love a woman, and a woman love a man,
so take my hand in yours, though we have no path or plan,
that we may dance in springtime when the flowers bloom in cheer,
and spin a pirouette to defy the turning of the year.
Then after comes a summer, when we wear a splendid crown,
and then we weep in autumn when the leaves are falling down.

A love may be as pure as sky and burn with blazing light,
undoing every darkness and making day from night,
but we ourselves, like water, through our fingers slip away;
can our love be everlasting when we have no strength to stay?
Beginnings come to endings for all we love and know;
we weep while leaves are falling, then after, only snow.

So take my hand in dancing, for the time will swiftly run,
but we may love together for a while in hope and sun;
perhaps it will give smiles that endure to our recall
even as our tears well up as leaves begin to fall.

Evening Note for Sunday, November 17

Thought for the Evening: Guised Being

Everything that we consider, we consider under the aspect of being. This can include either actual being or potential being or merely possible being; such a thing is traditionally known as ens realis, or real being, because they can actually exist as something. However, we also often consider things that cannot exist as something; for instance, I can consider a hole in a wall, which is not an existing thing. Yet when I consider it, I consider 'on the model of' (in Latin: instar) or 'along the lines of' an existing thing. Such a thing is known as ens rationis, or rational being. Ens rationis is not necesarily fictitious or illusory -- it is not a fiction or an illusion that there is a hole in the wall; rather, it is something that actually is there, but not as a something that has a being of its own. Likewise, to say that evil is a privation is to say that it is an ens rationis; it is not to say that there is no evil.

In any case, this notion of 'on the model of' is interesting, and I've come to think that there are other ways besides ens rationis in which it plays an important role. A significant case is when we consider one ens realis on the model of another being (either ens realis or ens rationis). Let's call this 'guised being', since we are considering one being under the guise of another.

Consider a painting. This obviously is an ens realis. Taken entirely on its own it is canvas stretched over a frame, with pigmented gunk in various shapes and textures and layerings on it. As a painting, however, it is not 'entirely on its own'; for instance, it is a sign, and has a relationality to that of which it is a painting. But it is possible to go beyond this. Someone could, for instance, talk to the painting as if it were the person painted. In such a case, the painting has guised being as the person painted. The Baroque scholastic philosopher Caramuel held that signs occur when they undergo moral transubstantiation, and become for practical purposes (in will, hence the 'moral') the things for which they stand. (Moral transubstantiation, of course, is not physical or natural transubstantiation, which would take divine power; rather, the natural thing in being considered by us also has moral being, in this case as a painted canvas, and becomes in the realm of the will the person painted, while remaining painted canvas in the realm of nature.) For a very great many reasons this cannot be an adequate or correct account of most signs. Nonetheless, I think Caramuel discovered, without adequately capturing the nuances, guised being, in which we think of one being not merely as like another, nor merely as related to another, but as another.

Guised being is not only found in art. It plays a significant role in modern science. Physicists are always considering physical systems (ens realis) in terms of idealized models (ens rationis) -- i.e., they think of something that is not a model on the model of a model, so to speak.  The fact that people are able to do this is important for understanding how the model can explain the actual thing in ways that (for instance) a mere metaphor doesn't;  we posit ens rationis because it allows us to make true judgments and more adequate explanations, and we guise a being as an idealized model for exactly the same reason.

Every guised being involves (1) that which is guised, (2) that which guises, and (3) a conflation for a purpose, such that the purpose structures (4) the domain of the guising. A child playing at being a knight might take a stick (the guised) and for the purpose of pretending to be a knight guise it as a sword (the guising); the stick is then a knight's sword within the context of the play-pretend. This guising then lets us analogically predicate of the stick things that are true of swords, again within the context of the play-pretend.

Various Links of Interest

 * Matthew Minerd, The Political Implications of Acquired Moral Virtue -- Even Amid the Life of Grace, at "A Thomist"

* Mark Zachary Taylor, The Most Controversial Nobel Prize in Recent Memory

* Ilana Raburn, Intrinsic Kinds in Internal Medicine (PDF)

* Chiara Palazzolo, It's Not Just the Music: The Ethics of Musical Interpretation (PDF) -- a very nice discussion, good both for those interested in philosophy of music and for those interested in the virtue of prudence.

* Sympawnies by Noam Oxman, which are pictures of pets in musical notation that can actually be played.

* Ben Orlin, Proof as a form of literature, at "Math with Bad Drawings"

* Kenneth L. Woodward interviews Denys Turner on Dante's Purgatorio, at "Commonweal"

* The Pillar had a nice interview recently with the chief foreign minister of the Knights of Malta.

* David Landy, Shepherd's Claim that Sensations Are Too Fleeting to Stand in Causal Relations with Other Sensations (PDF)

* Ryan Holston, Straw Men and the Possibility of Community in Modernity, at "The Front Porch Republic"

Currently Reading

Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown
Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions
Edward Feser, Immortal Souls
Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

In Audiobook

Stephen R. Lawhead, The Spirit Well
Kenneth W. Harl, Empires of the Steppes

Arnobius on 'Natural Evil'

 Would you venture to say that, in this universe, this thing or the other thing is an evil, whose origin and cause you are unable to explain and to analyze? And because it interferes with your lawful, perhaps even your unlawful pleasures, would you say that it is pernicious and adverse? What, then, because cold is disagreeable to your members, and is wont to chill the warmth of your blood, ought not winter on that account to exist in the world? And because you are unable to endure the hottest rays of the sun, is summer to be removed from the year, and a different course of nature to be instituted under different laws? Hellebore is poison to men; should it therefore not grow? The wolf lies in wait by the sheepfolds; is nature at all in fault, because she has produced a beast most dangerous to sheep? The serpent by his bite takes away life; a reproach, forsooth, to creation, because it has added to animals monsters so cruel.

It is rather presumptuous, when you are not your own master, even when you are the property of another, to dictate terms to those more powerful; to wish that that should happen which you desire, not that which you have found fixed in things by their original constitution. Wherefore, if you wish that your complaints should have a basis, you must first inform us whence you are, or who you are; whether the world was created and fashioned for you, or whether you came into it as sojourners from other regions. And since it is not in your power to say or to explain for what purpose you live beneath this vault of heaven, cease to believe that anything belongs to you; since those things which take place are not brought about in favour of a part, but have regard to the interest of the whole.

[Arnobius of Sicca, Seven Books Against the Heathen, Book 1, chapters 11-12.]